Camelot II cleanup goes slow

Some residents are frustrated by the pace

Nila Garrett, 13, watches as friends look for the source of running water behind a house they said was empty as they walk through an alley lined with trash and discarded furniture in Camelot II. They found an outside faucet running and turned it off.

Photo By Lisa Krantz/San Antonio Express-News

Trash and discarded furniture fill the backyard of an empty home along an alley in the Camelot II neighborhood on the Northeast Side.

Photo By Lisa Krantz/San Antonio Express-News

Anthony Green, 7, walks in a Camelot II alley. Residents are trying to get the neighborhood cleaned up, but face a daunting task.

Photo By Lisa Krantz/San Antonio Express-News

Dejahnae Easterling, 9, steps over water running along an alley in Camelot II.

Photo By Lisa Krantz/San Antonio Express-News

A dog forages for food in trash lining an alley in the Camelot II neighborhood in Northeast San Antonio on Friday, Nov. 23, 2012.

Photo By Nolan Hicks

A house on Oldham Drive in the Camelot II neighborhood, taken on October 2, 2012. The Bexar County District Attorney announced Tuesday that she had given owners of the 30 most-junked out properties in two Northeast San Antonio neighborhoods 30 days to clean up their mess or they would be taken to court.

More than a month ago, local leaders — one state representative, two county commissioners and the district attorney — got together, held a news conference and announced the latest plan to try to clean up trash-plagued unincorporated neighborhoods, like Camelot II, on the Northeast Side.

And over the past month, the situation in Camelot II seems to have improved somewhat: the front yards of many of the homes on Oldham Drive have been cleared of much of the debris that previously covered them.

It's an improvement community activist Adam Washington, 26, attributed to neighborhood efforts to get a handle on the problem, not the promised crackdown.

The seeming inaction angered him, but the neighborhood realizes that the problem can't be fixed immediately, he said.

“We're just asking for the help and assistance that we need,” Washington said.

Under state law, county governments do not have a municipal government's power to mandate property owners keep up their property.

Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed's office came up with a legally inventive way to compel landlords in Camelot II and Windsor Oaks to clean up the mess — citing them for violating the state's Health and Safety Code.

But it hasn't been a quick remedy.

In early October, the DA's office notified the owners of 30 properties in those two neighborhoods that they were out of compliance and had 30 days to clean them up.

Adriana Biggs, the chief of the office's white-collar-crimes division, acknowledged the neighborhood's frustration and said investigators will reinspect those 30 locations Monday as a prelude to filing charges against landlords who haven't acted.

“We've given these people long enough to remedy the nuisances,” she said.

Biggs said she expected the misdemeanor charges would be filed in the following days but cautioned it could be a while longer before the neighborhood sees the impact.

“It takes effort and it's not an easy problem to solve,” she said.

Bexar County plans to lobby state lawmakers in the upcoming legislative session to give it the power to require landlords with two or more residential properties to set up trash and solid waste services for their units.

As the gears of the legal and political systems grind toward a more permanent solution, residents in the Camelot II neighborhood have attempted to tackle the problem on their own, with limited success. The progress of cleaner front yards along Oldham Drive quickly disappears as you head into the alley behind the homes.

There, a seemingly endless pile of trash stretches for the entirety of one block. And on the other side of the alley, the back yards of vacant homes also serve as another dumping point. The trash-infested undergrowth of weeds and untrimmed trees is punctuated by a couple of areas where volunteers attempted to make a dent in the mess.

“All this got done by hand,” Washington said, as he walked through the alley, pointing to the areas where the brush had been knocked down and some of the trash removed.

Still, the size of the mess that remained was overwhelming. Even more dispiriting, someone had dumped a new bunch of trash in one of the areas they had worked to clean.

The vacant homes that dot the neighborhood are another point of concern for Washington, who said the neighborhood kids have taken to playing in them, with their yards full of smashed bottles, empty cans, abandoned prescription drug containers, busted electronics, clothing and other trash.

“If there's no jungle gym, kids will create one,” he said.

What he wants, he said, is one good cleaning to help get the neighborhood back on its feet.